“And Grandfather Sen is like this?”
“A touch. Upper middle class, Chinese Cambodian. His wife was true royalty, I think….” Tyrone paused. “And then there’s his daughter, Madame Tek. Oh wow. Let’s not forget your potential mother in law.” Tyrone was chortling. “She may be three inches high, she could probably run under a weasel, but man. These little Khmer women, they wai and scrape and make your noodles, but you cross them, just once?” He did a scissoring gesture. “Snip.”
Jake winced. Tyrone snatched up a menu.
“Hey, I’m hungry. Aren’t you? Must be. You’ve probably been eating bees for a few days, no? In Laos? You gotta love that variety.” Tyrone turned to the attendant waiter. “Burger, please. Rare. Properly rare. Aw kohn!”
“I’ll have the… the pad thai. Whatever. Thanks. Aw kohn.” Jake handed the menu to the waiter, who executed a wai, then returned to the kitchen.
Tyrone was quiet for a moment, then he turned to Jake.
“There’s one other thing that worries me. Your story.”
“Yes?”
“One bit you skipped over.”
“What?”
Tyrone spoke quietly. The moon was sickly yellow in the sky behind him.
“Jake. You say those police cars coming after you — one of them hit a bomb or a mine.”
“Yes.”
“And possibly some cops were thrown, maybe injured — even killed?”
“I’m not sure. I saw one of them stumble out. Jesus. Jesus Christ… of course—”
The ugly reality dawned on Jake, like he’d woken to a nasty breakfast. The police car that exploded. Now he dwelled on it, conceptually, for a moment — it was obvious. Trouble. Serious trouble. They wouldn’t just let this go. Would they?
Tyrone summed it up: “Maybe a cop died, maybe he didn’t, but that’s serious. Add it to the doctor’s death — murder or suicide — and you have a very serious incident. Perhaps the Lao government will forget about the problem, rather than publicize it.” He squinted at Jake. “That is possible. But maybe they won’t just forget it. They could go through the Cambodian authorities, ask them to arrest you. Or someone might just quietly tell someone… who hires someone. Maybe you should watch your back on Monivong Boulevard.”
The scorpion of fear scuttled down Jake’s collar, under his shirt, and down his spine. He shivered at the sensation. Red-haired, war-chewed old Tyrone McKenna was surely right. Watch your back on Monivong.
Jake stood. He felt ill at ease again, very ill at ease.
“I need a leak.”
Turning on a heel, he crossed the bar to the toilets. He unzipped and sighed, and gazed anxiously out the bathroom window at the river. On both riverbanks, people were out walking. Poor families were frying eggs in braziers on patches of scruffy grass. Bonfires burned. The squid sellers hawked their racks of dried translucent squid. Dried and swaying, like the kun krak.
Jake felt the scorpion move under his shirt. The fear. This city: it always got to him. He found Phnom Penh addictive in its anarchy and energy and exoticism, but it was also a truly harrowing city. Menacing by day and haunted at all times. A city spooked by an unknown future — and a tragic and appalling past.
Down there on those crowded boulevards, on Monivong and Sisowath and National Highway 5, the Khmer Rouge had marched two million townspeople, out of the city, in two sunburned days in April 1975: they had cleared the whole capital as soon as they had won the civil war. People were tipped from hospital beds and forced to walk. The elderly who stumbled were left to dehydrate in the gutter. Children were lost in the chaos and never found again. The capital city was emptied, society was deconstructed, all was dissolved. Two days.
They even blew up the central bank, destroying all the money in the country, sending banknotes and government bonds flying into the shattered streets. The banknotes hung for weeks from the wilting jacaranda trees, like old confetti. Money was officially useless. And then the Khmer Rouge sent the nation into slavery, and they worked and starved a quarter of the population to death, and bludgeoned half a million more. Killing their own parents, their own sons, their own brothers, their own families. Devouring themselves in an orgy of self-harm. The nation that hated itself. The nation that killed itself.
His phone was ringing. It was Chemda.
Her voice was an urgent whisper.
“I got a call from Agnès, in Luang.”
“And?”
“One of the hotel workers, a bellboy. He confessed. He put the things in our rooms.”
“But why—”
“He was told to do it. The smoke babies were ordered, by the kra, the Neang Kmav of Skuon.”
“The who? Who is that?”
The line hissed and deadened for a moment. “Sorry, Jake. I—” The voice was gone, then it returned. “My mother is crying. The whole family is in chaos. Have to go — maybe I can call you back—”
The call ended. Jake waited for a moment, and another moment, and nothing happened. Slipping the phone into his pocket, he returned to his bar stool. His plate of pad thai was sitting on the table. Tyrone was already assaulting his burger. Jake picked up his knife and fork, but he didn’t feel remotely hungry anymore. His stomach was full of fluttering nerves. He had already dined, too much, on fear and angst.
He told Tyrone what Chemda had told him. Tyrone stopped eating.
“The Neang Kmav of Skuon?”
“What? What is the Kmav? What is Skuon?”
Tyrone looked atypically rattled. “Skuon is a small town near here. They eat spiders there. Tarantulas.”
“What?”
“And the Neang Kmav is the Black Lady, a notorious fortune-teller who lives there.” Tyrone was shaking his head. “It sounds like a stupid cartoon, but that… that is bad news.”
“But—”
“She’s an extremely powerful sorceress, one of those Khmer witch doctors that gets hired by Thai generals, Malay sultans, Chinese billionaires. Jake, this is the spider witch of Skuon we’re talking about. The spider witch of Skuon.” He gazed at Jake’s frightened face. “Hey. Chillax. At least if she turns you into a frog it will make a good headline.”
14
The air was still and cold above the Cham des Bondons. The stars looked down, protectively, on the standing stones. And on Annika’s little cottage, in the abandoned village. Vayssière.
Hunched over her laptop in the low-ceilinged sitting room, Annika was drinking wine and typing furiously. And drinking wine.
Her fingers paused. She squinted. The ambient light was rich and low and yellow in the room, cast by her antique table lamp with the lemon silk shade. The light from her screen was harsher, and brighter — and it stung her eyes.
Or was this stinging actually tears? Annika rarely if ever cried. She was proud of her scientific logic; she was proud of her coolness. But the emotion of confessing, after so long, was profound. Agony and relief at the same time. Because it was so hard to be honest. That’s why she was drinking, that’s why she was drunk: she needed the courage to do this. To wrench the lies away.
The years of complicity and deceit, with Ghislaine, meant the deceit had become part of her, grown deeply into her being. She was like one of those sad old trees on the Cham: a tree that had grown too close to barbed wire, so that the tree had eventually grown around the wire, and absorbed it, slowly and painfully, until the cruel iron wire was part of the tree itself. But she had to rip out the lies, because they were killing her, slowly.